T. Boyle - Water Music

And then the doctor is off, flitting round the room, refilling the glasses, offering cigars, oatcakes, kippered herring, jars of preserves, jerking books from the shelves and all the while jabbering about a case of impetigo he’s been treating in an Abbotsford lady. “Horseradish!” he shouts. “Five parts. Put that against two parts menstrual blood and three parts bezoar stone and the sores’ll disappear as if ye’d touched ‘em with a wand. Blast homeotherapy. I say stick with the tried and true.” The doctor pauses and turns round to look at the explorer as if he were seeing him for the first time. “But I guess ye’ve heard enough out of me. It’s me daughter ye’ve come about, isn’t it?”

Mungo takes the doctor’s hand. “I want to marry her.”

“Marry her?” Dr. Anderson shouts. “Of course ye want to marry her. Did ye not ask the gull to wait for ye while ye was off riskin’ life and limb amongst the niggers and Hottentots? And don’t ye call that an engagement — even if ye never give her no ring?”

“I–I’ve got a ring right—” the explorer stammers, fumbling through his pockets, “right—”

“And don’t an engagement mean a holy troth to be married before the eyes of the Laird and man?” Somehow the doctor has worked himself up into a sort of stentorian rage. His last words echo through the room like the voice of judgment, setting up sympathetic vibrations in the glassware on the shelves.

The explorer is no less puzzled at the excess of emotion than at the line of questioning. “Well, yes—”

“Ye’re deuced right, lad,” the doctors bawls, red to the eyes. “Marry her then,” he roars, then lowers his voice abruptly — is he winking or is there something caught in his eye? — ”but treat her right, lad, treat her right.” And then he’s gone, the door engaging the frame like distant thunder.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later the door swings open with a whisper. The explorer has been sitting in the big armchair by the window trying to make sense of the esoteric drawings that paper the walls. Is it some new craze of Zander’s? he wonders, when the soft click of the latch strikes at his nervous system like a sudden ferment of churchbells. He leaps up from the chair as Ailie slips into the room and gently closes the door behind her. He doesn’t know what to say. Awkward, harried by his emotions, his confidence shattered by yesterday’s debacle, he can only gape at her.

She too is silent. But her lower lip is unsteady and her eyes are gorged with green, the pupils drawn in on themselves, pinpoints, hard and cold with resentment, determination, anger. Aside from those eyes and lips and the tumed-up nose, he hardly recognizes her. She’s been transformed. The country girl in a white cotton dress and clogs is standing before him looking like a London socialite, turned out à la mode in a free-flowing gown of English velvet with gold brocade scrawled across the bodice, the velvet a shade of green so rich and dark it could carpet a forest floor. Her clipped black hair is swept back beneath a matching green cap, her face is powdered, feet elegantly slippered. Perched on her forearm, as cool and gray as rainclouds, are the turtle doves.

“Well,” she says finally, “father says you wanted to see me.”

“I did. I do,” he answers, starting toward her and then hesitating, the package held out before him like an offering. “I want—” he begins, the words marshaling themselves at the tip of his tongue, words to express simple emotions and expectations, love, marriage, family — but something interferes, some sudden and stunning mindblock, a function of his debilitated condition, the night of drinking, nerves at a pitch, the quick rise from the chair. He’d had six or seven attacks while in London, the malarial curse reaching a long arm from the coast of Africa to muddle his thoughts and rock his knees. Once he’d lost his train of thought while addressing the Ladies’ Equestrian and Geopolitical Society of Chelsea, and Sir Joseph had had to step in and finish for him. Another time he blacked out at the Baroness’ after a single glass of champagne. Now he inexplicably finds himself on his knees, a good twenty feet from Ailie, wondering what he was about to say.

“Yes?” she prompts, her face softening in anticipation.

“I uh. . uh. . I. .”

“Yes?” She moves a step or two closer, alarmed at the expression on her lover’s face — has she been too hard on him? “Is it the package you want to give me?” she whispers, as if talking to a child. “Is the package for me?”

Mungo shakes his head to clear it, down on all fours now like a dog come in from the rain. He looks down at the package as if he’s never seen it before. “I want. . want. . uh. . I want to. . uh. .”

Good God, what have they done to him? Mortified, she drops her arm and the startled doves take wing, careening into the walls, flapping against the ceiling in a panic. . and then she’s on the floor beside him, cupping his face in her hands and trying desperately to make sense of his eyes.

“Mungo? Mungo: are you all right?”

He turns his head to kiss her hand and then stretches out prone on the floor, the package at his side. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” he says, and suddenly she’s on her feet and out the door shouting for her father.

An instant later Dr. Anderson bursts into the room, white-faced, the new apprentice at his side. “Quick boy: salts! And bring me my bag — we’re going to have to bleed him!”

The salts bring the explorer around — enough so that doctor and assistant can prop him up in the chair and make an incision in his forearm. Ailie is there, equal to the occasion, gritting her teeth and holding the gleaming porcelain bowl while her fiance’s blood runs fresh and wet between her hands and leaps to spatter her dress. The apprentice, a boy of sixteen with a wandering eye, turns his head and then excuses himself to vomit in the fireplace while the old man thunders and the doves coo from the mantel.

♦ ♦ ♦

Later, much later, Ailie stands before the mirror in her room, unfastening her earrings, releasing the clasp of her necklace. It is past three in the morning. Mungo is sleeping soundly in the guest room, a bit pale from loss of blood and running a slight fever, but over the worst of it. She and Zander have been sitting up with him through the night. When she left for bed Zander was nodding in a straight-backed chair, a glass of brandy jammed between his legs.

She pulls the dress up over her head and lays it across the bed, smoothing back the creases. The blood has dried black against the green, hardly noticeable, and yet she runs her hand over the spatters thinking how stubborn they are and at the same time wondering what they’d look like under the microscope. She pictures herself by the window, pinning down a section of the dress and screwing it into focus, a patch of something organic freckling the material, fibers that clot and draw a wound together like fingers, fibers inextricably bound up in the calculated weave of the fabric. Dried blood. Frangible, no more than dust — and yet the stain will persist through half a dozen washings.

On the edge of the bed now, in her underthings, she waits a long tired moment before reaching to remove her shoes and stockings. She’s exhausted and exhilarated, empty and fulfilled. No more games, no more waiting. She’d been acting like a schoolgirl. Her man is back, and he needs her — that’s all that matters. The shoes drop to the floor, first the left, then the right, when suddenly the package on the dressing table catches her attention. Bulky, crudely wrapped. He’d been trying to give it to her when the attack came on. Something from London?

Moths bat round the oil lamp. A cricket rubs its legs together somewhere in the far corner of the room. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, a thousand others respond until the night crepitates with an airy whistling cacophony that sounds like an army of babies shaking their rattles. Ailie gets up from the bed, arms and legs bare, glides to the dressing table and hefts the package in one hand. Heavy. Solid. What an odd shape. She wants to tear it open, but no, she can’t do that — Mungo would want to see her surprise. Resolute, she sets it down again. And begins unlacing her stays. A moment later she slips out of the corset, drops her underthings to the floor, and is about to start for the wardrobe when the package again catches her eye. She hfts it a second time, puzzling, and then — before she can think — she’s shredding the paper with her nails.